Core Dump

I've decided to create a second blog at http://jeff-lamarche.blogspot.com where I'll put any posts that are not related to writing iOS software, Apple, or the mobile software industry.

My first substantive post should show up some time this evening if all goes well.

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Mea Culpa

The original version of my Briefs.app blog post contained a snarky comment about the Director of the App Review team and a link to a Wired article about his past. A friend of mine, who happens to work at One Infinite Loop, privately took me to task for including that link in my post.

It took me about two seconds, now that I'm a little further away from it and not as angry, to realize that he's 100% right. It was a dick move on my part and I'm sorry for it. I have removed the link and offer my apologies to Phillip Shoemaker. The fact is, I have no visibility into what's going on and don't know where the holdup is on Briefs.app. For all I know, Mr. Shoemaker could be valiantly fighting for Briefs.app against higher up forces in the company, so casting an ad hominem attack like that was juvenile and uncool.

My basic feelings about the matter are unchanged, however. It was uncool when Apple left Google Voice in limbo, but that was one small product from one very large company. In this case, it's the sweat equity from one individual developer who worked very, very hard, sacrificing sleep, family time, and entertainment to create something very cool. The impact is much greater and much more personal and it's hard for me not to get angry about it.

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Briefs.app

My co-worker and all-around good guy, Rob Rhyne has officially open sourced Briefs.app as of today. After three months of being dicked around by Apple's review team, he's finally given up on getting Briefs.app onto the App Store.

Throughout the ordeal, Rob has taken the whole thing with tremendous grace and has only good things to say about the people involved in the entire process. I hope he'll forgive me for not being quite so gracious.

I'm pissed on his behalf, since he won't be. Make no mistake: This sucks. This is no way to treat anybody, but especially him. Rob has bent over backwards throughout the process to be nice and work within the system and to avoid saying anything negative about the problems he's faced. Rob has kept the discourse on a level I think few of us could manage. He didn't go out and raise a stink the way many developers have when they felt slighted by the App Review team. Rob just calmly and patiently worked within the system trying to make his case and get a product he worked on for months onto the app store… while working a full time job, starting a new business, and being a parent to a toddler. Oh, and his wife works too. Rob's one of the few developers I know who spends more time sitting at a computer than me.

If Apple's review team had just come out and rejected the app, it would have sucked, and it would have been the wrong decision, but it would have been an acceptable situation. The app review team's job is to make tough decisions. Sometimes they're going to make bad decisions, and sometimes they're going to make decisions that we developers are going to disagree with.

But since making decisions is, in fact, their job and they've never actually made a decision about this particular app, it's not an acceptable nor a forgivable situation. Three fucking months Briefs.app has sat in the review queue, and in that time, the app review team has allowed other prototyping applications onto the app store: applications that do the same basic tasks that Briefs.app was created to do. Interface was approved several weeks after Briefs.app was submitted to the App Store. LiveView and Dapp were both updated just yesterday. iMockups was approved about a week ago.

But Briefs still sits in the queue and nobody can be bothered to even say what the exact holdup is or what needs to happen before a decision will get made.

I don't know what reason they could have for dragging it on like this and not making a decision, but it's not right. Apple owes Rob, and all the people who want to use Briefs, an apology.

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Voices that Matter Philadelphia

Just wanted to let you know that I will be speaking at the next Voices That Matter iPhone Developer Conference in Philadelphia, PA which runs from October 16 and 17th. I was originally asked to do a talk on 4.0 Multitasking, which I will be doing. I've also recently been asked to give a second talk on OpenGL ES. I've agreed to do that presentation as well, and now I have a few days to decide on the specific topic and audience and to write up the abstract.

I was thinking of doing a "from 1.1 to 2.0" kind of talk, exploring the differences between the fixed and programmable pipeline and trying to explain some of the more daunting concepts of the programmable pipeline. The goal would be to make the jump from 1.1 to 2.0 (which Apple is pushing) less scary.

I'm not sure if that's a topic with broad enough appeal, though. Are you going to VTM? What would you like to see from an OpenGL ES talk?

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Beta Builder

A week or two ago, Jeffrey Sambells had a blog post about using Xcode's Enterprise distribution for ad hoc distribution. It's a great idea that a lot of developers saw had great potential, but it had several manual steps.

Since that post, Hunter Hillegas of Hanchor, LLC and developer of Vegas Mate, has created an application to automate the entire process. The app is called Beta Builder, and it's free. If you do much ad hoc distribution, you should check it out.

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App Licensing

For all those people telling me that Google's App Licensing would put a definitive stop to piracy on Android and that Apple should implement something similar, all I can say is: I told you you were wrong and here's proof, and it didn't take even as long as I said it would.

I understand Google has to address piracy because it's a bit of a black eye for the platform. They need third party developers, and a lot of third party developers are gun-shy about developing for a platform with a reputation for rampant piracy. Although the iPhone has its own problems with piracy, it's on a completely different scale. The closed nature of the platform is actually an advantage for third party developers, much the way gaming consoles are. Sure, Apple's protection scheme has been compromised and any App posted to the app store can be pirated easily. But, because only people who Jailbreak their phones can actually install the hacked software, and Jailbreaking a phone can cause problems with future updates from Apple, there's built-in damage control.

It also helps that you can buy App Store apps in every country where you can legally buy an iPhone. On Android, you can only buy apps in 13 countries, meaning people in other countries either have to do without paid apps, or have to pirate. There's built-in incentive in that system for people who might be perfectly willing to pay for an app to go pirate it. Google would get more for their piracy-battling dollar by expanding the paid markets than by implementing more hare-brained licensing schemes that won't ever make a dent in piracy.

I don't envy Tim Bray's task of having to try and reassure Android developers that this crack isn't a problem. Of course it's a problem. It's a problem the media industries have been fighting with since the dawn of digital content. The RIAA, MPAA, and media companies have invested millions, maybe even billions of dollars into various schemes that have failed to make much of a dent in piracy.

For those who think this App Licensing can ever work, you (much like the media industry) fail to grasp the inherent technical flaw with any kind of DRM. With DRM, you have to provide the legal purchaser with the content and with the key to unlock that content. No matter how sophisticated the stuff in-between, no matter how complex the lock, a sufficiently technically knowledgeable person who has the content and the key to unlocking it can find a way to free the content from its protection. On Android, once you've freed the content from its DRM, you can distribute it to anybody because of the ability to sideload applications. So on most Android phones right now, once a single copy of a program has been hacked, it's just as easy to pirate as it was without App Licensing.

With software, finding the balance between making it inconvenient to pirate (because you can't make it impossible) without overly inconveniencing your customers is hard. It's easier on a closed platform. That's not to say there aren't downsides to a closed platform — of course there are — but this is one of the clear advantages for third party developers. Truth be told, you simply can not stop the dedicated pirate, but a closed platform does deter the bulk of the pirates who can be diverted into paying customers by making it inconvenient. Best of all, it does it without affecting the legal purchasers, unlike most DRM.

When it comes down to it, the most effective way to stop piracy is to make it easy and convenient for as many people to buy content legally as is possible and to price it fairly. This is something Google clearly doesn't get, or else you'd be able to buy paid apps everywhere you can buy an Android phone.

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UIImage-Blur

Many moons ago, I wrote convolution kernel for Cocoa. It had convenience class functions to do many different types of filters, including blurring, embossing, outlining, edge detection, horizontal shift, LaPlacian, soften, high pass, etc. Now, this was before Core Image and long before the switch to Intel. I don't remember exactly when I first wrote it, but I'm guessing it was around 2001 or 2002. The method that actually applied the filter to an image used AltiVec if it was available, and if it wasn't, it did a brute force filter on the CPU.

Of course, once the switch to Intel happened, the AltiVec code was no longer was helpful, and then Apple came out with Core Image which includesda convolution kernel and all of the filter settings I had created and more. So, I stopped maintaining the code.

Then, when the iPhone came out and didn't have Accelerate or Core Image, I saw a potential use for the old source code. I had a project early on where I needed to be able to blur an image. So, I blew the dust off the old code. I didn't convert the entire convolution kernel – I didn't want to go through the effort if it wasn't going to work — so I created a blur category on UIImage. And it didn't work.

Pressed for time, I found another solution because I was uncertain the processor on the original iPhone would be able to apply a convolution kernel fast enough for my purposes, but I included the broken code when I released the source code for replicating the Urban Spoon effect. Today, I received an e-mail from a reader who figured out my rather boneheaded mistake. The convolution filter was fine, I just specified the wrong CGImage when specifying my provider while converting the byte data back to a CGImage.

Now, since I wrote that code, Apple has come out with the Accelerate framework for iOS, so it could definitely be made faster. It's unlikely that I will be able to spend the time converting it to use Accelerate unless I need a convolution kernel for my own client work; I've got too much on my plate right now to tackle it. If anyone's interested in doing the full convolution kernel port, you can check out the source code to Crimson FX. It's an old Cocoa project which may not work anymore, but it has, I believe, the last version of the convolution kernel before I gave up maintaining it. It shouldn't be hard to port the entire convolution kernel to iOS in the same manner. Once you get to the underlying byte data, the process is exactly 100% the same (even if byte order is different), and the code to convert to and from the byte data is this UIImage-Blur category.

So, without further ado, I've created a small scaffold project to hold the unaccelerated UIImage-Blur category. Have fun with it and let me know if you use it in anything interesting. If you improve it and would like to share your improvements, let me know, and I'll post it here.

You can find the source code right here. Here's a screenshot of the test scaffold with the original image and after several blurs have been applied. The image is from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection. Plattsburgh is where I grew up, so this public domain image struck my fancy. I don't know why, but the Army Base was spelled Plattsburg without the ending 'h' even though the city has always been Plattsburgh with the ending 'h'.



Thanks to Anthony Gonsalves for finding my error!

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